Hubs golf coach Glen Mehrings took some practice swings while youth players Ben Rankin and Parker Lenkaitis looked on during the third session of Rochelle’s golf camp Wednesday afternoon at the Aldeen Golf Club Practice Centre.
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ROCKFORD — Hubs golf coach Glen Mehrings took some practice swings while youth players Ben Rankin and Parker Lenkaitis looked on during the third session of Rochelle’s golf camp Wednesday afternoon at the Aldeen Golf Club Practice Centre.
Accompanied by varsity players Noah Griffith and Tyler Nalley, Mehrings and the boys began camp with chipping drills before moving over to the driving range and ending the session on the putting green. While many of the balls didn’t land far from the club, Mehrings said the goal of the camp is to help players learn the fundamental skills of golf, a sport he said takes years of practice to become good at.
“It’s really fun to get the kids out to a place where they can make mistakes and learn,” Mehrings said. “They might start 1-for-10 in quality shots but by the end of the week they’ll be 1-for-4 or 1-for-5, and they really enjoy seeing the slight improvement in the way they strike the ball… You want to create that excitement because golf is so hard and you’ll hit a lot of bad shots, but eventually those shots will fall away.”
Camp began Monday afternoon, with Hub player Garrett Glosser joining the campers on Tuesday before Griffith and Nalley arrived at the Practice Centre on Wednesday. Thursday is the last scheduled day of camp, but Mehrings is hoping the young players will continue to practice and take more swings as the summer progresses.
“When they hit that nice one and the ball just takes off… They just want to replicate that feeling over and over again,” Mehrings said. “It takes about 10,000 swings to make some really concrete changes, and it takes time but once they start envisioning what they need to do to improve, changes start to take shape. It’s hard to change a lot of things in four days but it helps them head in the right direction.”
While the boys hit plenty of balls on Wednesday, they spend a lot of time working on pre-shot techniques such as maintaining good posture and lining up their shots. With so many factors making up one swing, Mehrings said one of his goals every summer is to help campers be patient and properly set up shots before pulling the trigger.
“When you don’t have the fundamentals in place, you do a lot of weird compensatory moves and the kids don’t realize what they’re doing,” Mehrings said. “We try to videotape them a little bit so we can show them what’s wrong and what’s right… Kids have good muscle control once they understand what they have to do.”